Gorbals Vampire comes to Belper

The Gorbals Vampire will be stalking the steeets of Belper on Sunday, October 30, when a dramatic storytelling show comes to the town.

Marty Ross will be performing The Gorbals Vampire show at the No. 28 community venue in Belper, from 7.30pm.

Ghoulish and Gothic, grotesque and blood-glugging – spend an evening with Glasgow’s very own blood sucker!

Scottish, but East Midlands-based, who better to bring Glasgow’s very own vampire legend to Derbyshire than storyteller and playwrightMarty Ross in this disturbing drama which should be just the thing for the night before Halloween.

It was in the 1950s that kids in Glasgow’s Gorbals area became convinced that the Southern Necropolis was haunted by an iron-toothed vampire with a taste for children.

Mass hysteria erupted among both young and old, kids embarking nightly on vampire hunts, wooden stakes in hand, while panicked adults called the police and demanded a ban on the US horror comics perceived - erroneously, modern historians believe - to be responsible: much more authentically local traditions were involved.

But this true story ended rather anti-climatically: there doesn’t, disappointingly, seem to have been a real vampire in the graveyard.

But Marty Ross’s drama asks: what if?

What if there actually was a

“something” there, very ancient and strange and terrible? And what if one vampire-mad boy found himself in the vampire’s clutches?

Those who have attended Ross’s previous dramatic storytelling performances at No.28, or at the Edinburgh or Southside Fringes, or Belper Arts Festival or the London Horror Festival, or at any of his other regular venues, will know that storytelling with Ross is far removed from the comfy chair clichés of this oldest, yet suddenly newest, of theatrical forms.

Rather his style is boldly theatrical and

expressionistic - darkly humorous and deeply creepy: the ideal thing

for getting you in the Halloween mood. How can you resist the spell of this very Glaswegian vampire?

Marty Ross is a playwright and storyteller with a long track record in radio and audio drama, particularly for the BBC, for whom he has written drama ranging from the Radio 4 series The Darker Side Of The Border to the popular serials Ghost Zone and Catch My Breath to one-off dramas such as Rough Magick, My Blue Piano, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, The Dead Of Fenwick Moor and Moyamensing: Scenes From The Life, Death & Dreams of Edgar Allan Poe.

He has also written two Doctor Who audio dramas. This year has seen the release of his most acclaimed production yet, Romeo And Jude, an epic love story featuring Owen Teale (Game of Thrones) and Nick Moran (Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels)